Mozilla Corp., which manages the open-source Firefox browser, announced today that Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation. Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found.
Official Blog Post: A New Chapter for Mozilla: Focused Execution and an Expanded Role in Charting the Internet’s Future
Mozilla is a for-proifit company!?!
They have a for-profit subsidiary, for tax purposes.
Mozilla Corporation is a corporation, and subsidiary to the Mozilla Foundation.
But what do they do?
Mainly develop software, like the Firefox browser.
waif can a non-profit run a for a profit??
Yesm It is weird, but it would be impossible for a foundation to develop complex software like a Web browser. Engineers cost.
i don’t think konqueror, gnome’s web browser, or abrowser are tied to for-profit entities, though i could be mistaken
They are skins over someone else’s browser.
KDE’s Konqueror uses Qt WebEngine, which is developed by the Qt Company and is based on Google:s Chromium.
GNOME’s Epiphany uses WebKit, developed by Apple.
Trisquel’s Abrowser is a rebranded Mozilla Firefox.
webkit is not developed by apple, they’re just using it for safari and contributing surprisingly little to the actual project
Ironically, all of these things except Abrowser are based on Konqueror’s original engine, KHTML, so Konqueror was actually the OG engine. KHTML was forked to WebKit, which was forked to Blink, which became the underpinnings of Qt WebEngine, which Konqueror now uses.
This is also why KHTML still appears in the user agent strings for all of these engines, but back in the day the Gecko engine used in Mozilla products was already a thing and KHTML was the alternative to that, hence “KHTML, like Gecko”.
KHTML was truly a milestone in Free Software history. Immense respect to KDE developers.
Yup, you can run a non-profit foundation with a for-profit corporation as a subsidiary, because capitalism I guess.
Yes. People got to eat.
They’re legit companies, but they do not operate with the goal of profit. Profit is something they may make, and in many cases it’s good so they can survive losses of funding or the like.
It also means they get certain tax advantages because they are not solely focused on profit